Give Pasta Salad A Bright Pop Of Flavor (And Color) With This Tangy Ingredient

A simple pasta salad can definitely hit the spot, but sometimes you want to switch things up. One of the best and most unexpected ways to do that is to simply add some kimchi; by doing so, you'll give the pasta salad a burst of unexpected flavor, as well as a pop of color with kimchi's bright red hue.

For the uninitiated, kimchi is a fermented vegetable dish from Korea. To learn more about adding kimchi to pasta salad, Daily Meal spoke with expert Ji Hye Kim, a renowned chef and the owner of the restaurant Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "At the end of the day, kimchi is preserved vegetables, just like pickles and sauerkraut," Kim says. "If your favorite pasta salad recipe calls for pickled cucumbers, that would be a fun place to try out a bit of kimchi instead of pickled cucumbers." If you're going to make this switch, Kim notes that it's important to chop up the kimchi into small pieces so that it fits well into the rest of the pasta salad.

If you've never done this before, you may be worried that the kimchi's strong flavor will overpower the dish — but Kim has a solution for this. "Rinse out the kimchi with water to get rid of the chili flakes and kimchi juice, and just gently squeeze the extra water off the kimchi," she explains. "This will add complexity and good kimchi flavor without having it overwhelm your pasta salad."

Do to kimchi's strong flavor, you may need to make some adjustments to your pasta salad recipe. "I tend to avoid adding kimchi to dishes with salty or funky cheeses like feta or Gruyere, and definitely not blue cheese," Ji Hye Kim tells us. "It's just a lot of competing funk and salt in one dish." Furthermore, she suggests replacing the cheese with fried tofu or pairing the kimchi with tomatoes.

But that's not all you can do to enhance a plain old pasta salad with kimchi. Kim suggests sprinkling toasted sesame seeds on top or mixing in soy sauce instead of salt. You could add grated garlic or ginger, chopped scallions, or, for some extra spice, gochujang (Korean red chili paste) or doenjang (a fermented soybean paste from Korea). Doenjang is already a great way to add a savory spin to pasta, so it would fit in perfectly with the flavor of your pasta salad.

Many pasta salad recipes include mayo as a dressing base, which will still work with a kimchi addition, but Kim also has some other recommendations. She mentions full fat or Greek yogurt as a great substitute, but she also has an idea that is more in line with kimchi. "Might I suggest adding soy sauce or gochujang or doenjang into mayo?" Kim advises. "Add as much or as little as you'd like, as long as the mayo mix is smooth and not super salty."